Leaders embrace nonprofit group’s expanded role as the manager of city’s former redevelopment areas

Q: What if the state vetoes some of your redevelopment spending plans?

Jeff Graham: If they stick to their guns, there likely will be litigation from the city or our development partners.

Q: A lot of neighborhoods want help in revitalization. What can CivicSD do?

Jeff Graham: We envision ourselves to be a creative and innovating neighborhood investment organization, where we are going to be pursuing funding sources that the city may not either legally be able to pursue or may not be structured to implement. What I’m finding in my new role is I’m having a lot of nonprofit organizations and foundations asking how they can help. They may have access to funds we don’t. They see us as a nonprofit, which is good because they may not be hesitant to provide us with funding and grants. A lot people don’t want to give money to a “city.”

Q: What are a couple of high priorities for 2013?

Donna Jones: I want to work on parking and shuttles. If we had a good shuttle system that goes from Balboa Park through downtown to the bay that hooks up with the port’s bayfront shuttle that will soon be implemented permanently, then even if you didn’t have a park directly across from you, you could get to the other parks fairly easily. Another thing I want to do is assure (non-downtown residents) that they will find parking when they come downtown. That’s a big fear. I hear that all the time — “We can never find parking when we come downtown.”

Jeff Graham: I would say our No. 1 challenge for downtown right is the homeless problem. We were making tremendous progress right when redevelopment was eliminated. We had prepared a five-year plan to eliminate homelessness downtown. We’re not going to be able to attract business to the extent we would like and residents are going to find this is a health problem, a safety problem, not to mention a humanitarian problem, until we find a solution to this.